In the last few years, there have been a lot of organisations that have started using social media as a marketing tool. Often the enthusiasm for social media is that great that organisations start to post before they have a clear social media strategy and policy.

One of the objectives of social media marketing should be to generate interaction with the audience – but which messages do you respond to, how do you respond and how can you keep the conversation going?

Part of an effective social media policy should be a social media response process. This is often called a social media triage process, in that each message goes through a process which will tell you how to respond best to it.

Receiving negative sentiment to your postings can be disheartening, but accept it as feed-back and use your social media triage process to show you how to respond. Here is an example of a triage process….

Example of Social Media Triage Process

This is a really good starting point, but your individual one will need to be tweaked, and most importantly names need to be put into the appropriate boxes. There are other considerations too…

It is usual that the marketing team will be managing social media, but if they need to check the facts of a particular post, how can they get hold of the right person promptly for the right response (the conversation on social media may not wait for the expert to come out of their meeting!).

Social media posts don’t just arrive between 9 and 5 Monday to Friday. What if a post comes in overnight from another country or on a Saturday morning? Who is responsible for the response then?

The social media triage process should be part of your social media strategy. It also needs to be flexible. Social media posts very rarely fall into neat categories that are simple to deal with, so you need to be able to flex your process according to the situation. If you implement one for your organisation, you will be in the minority – most organisations have not done this yet, so put it on the agenda for January!

Do you have a social media triage process? How do you deal with positive and negative sentiment posts? Leave a comment and let me know!